


seams

by wishtheworst



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 08:44:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5620621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishtheworst/pseuds/wishtheworst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathan, Audrey and Duke make a new life after Croatoan, but Nathan can't quite come to terms with the fate he's chosen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seams

**Author's Note:**

> Ficmix for while you read:
> 
> [the second time around: a ficmix for seams](http://8tracks.com/wishtheworst/the-second-time-around-a-ficmix-for-seams?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button) from [wishtheworst](http://8tracks.com/wishtheworst?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button) on [8tracks Radio](http://8tracks.com?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button).

The table is a mess of dirty plates and empty beer bottles, but no one seems inclined to clean up or even move unless it’s to change a record that’s come to the end. Duke came home with the old suitcase turntable and a stack of albums a few days ago and Audrey fell in love instantly. Now she sways around the little house to the warm, scratchy notes that pour out of tiny speakers for her, _Blonde on Blonde_ and _Rumors_ and _Let’s Stay Together_. The candles on the counter sputter out their last as their conversation fades away into nothing, giving way to “Masters of War” and the wind picking up outside. 

Nathan finally clears away the dishes and tidies up, packs away leftovers and swallows a handful of aspirin that won’t touch the headache that hangs relentlessly at the edge of his mind. He turns around to see Duke leaning against the counter behind him and he can’t quite suppress the shudder that runs through him. 

“Head still bothering you?”

“Yeah. But it’s no big deal. I’m just not used to it.”

Duke closes the distance between them and works his thumbs in slow, gentle circles on Nathan’s temples. It’s good, comforting, and Nathan’s eyes slip closed. He’s overcome with the good kind of exhaustion, the kind of sleepiness that pulls at you after a good meal and one drink too many. The warmth of it overcomes the nagging anxiety that pulls at him. Arms wrap around his waist from behind and Audrey’s weight presses against his back, her face nestled into his shoulder blade. 

“Ready to call it a night?” 

Upstairs Nathan lets them pull him into a tangle of limbs and the press of eager mouths and he loses himself inside those things and inside the narrow, suffocating space between them. They’re just like they’ve always been, like Mara never came and brought William and Charlotte and Croatoan and aether to their perfectly imperfect world. It’s as if they’re untouched, washed clean of everything that happened by a new life for the three of them together. Sometimes he gets close to that place and almost joins them there. It feels possible with his face buried in the sweat-damp curve of Audrey’s neck and Duke’s voice dark and promising in his ear. 

Afterward he lies awake listening to them breathe. He has nightmares almost every night. They never do. 

“What do you dream about?” he asked Duke once, as casually as he could. 

“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment, a frown crossing his face. “I guess I don’t really dream that much at all.”

Audrey tells him the same, word for word.

+++

Those last days in Haven were nightmares and felt more like walking through dreams than reality. Nathan didn’t remember them, not at first, and those first few magical weeks were incredible. For a handful of days they were just two ex cops and a retired pirate who decided to walk out on the lives they knew to start again in a new seaside city. They settled into a shabby house near the beach and filled it with furniture from a second-hand store. They didn’t need much. They had each other now, unequivocally, without anyone asking questions or demanding they….demanding whatever drove them away from home and into this new life.

It stuck with him, and the more it stuck with him the more he couldn’t understand why it didn’t stick with them. Audrey’s laugh rang through the house, her voice full of delight as she talked about making her first friend at work or convinced them that pie was the perfect breakfast, even better than pancakes. Duke took to ripping out the wall between two of the tiny bedrooms upstairs, making one that could accommodate three inhabitants, and he never looked over his shoulder anymore, never radiated distrust and crackling nervous energy. It was perfect. They were perfect. 

And Nathan just couldn’t be, because he knew there had been a time when they were different. When they were like he still was.

The first time it came back he was in the shower. The word _Croatoan_ spiked through his brain, meaningless for a second then crushing him under its weight. Suddenly he was freezing under the spray of hot water, hands scrabbling over the slick tiles for some kind of anchor. Minutes later he wiped the fog from the mirror and stood staring at himself for some sign that would give away what he’d done. 

First, the life doesn’t drain out of people. The light doesn’t slowly leave their eyes. He couldn’t will away the memory of how very alive Duke had been crushed in his arms for all the wrong reasons, struggling not to struggle. One minute he was there. He was Duke. The next he was gone, a still-warm, lifeless reminder that the place Nathan had given so much of his happiness over the years required another sacrifice. And it was hard to even say for what. Nothing they did seemed to have any impact. Croatoan’s rules, the rules of Haven ( _because that’s what it was called, as cruel a joke as it was_ ) were arbitrary, unsolvable. There was just one thing left for him, and as he clung to Duke even after he faded away for good Nathan knew that he would probably be asked to give her up to. Or she would be forced to sacrifice him.

There was no winning. There wasn’t even really any surviving. Not anymore. 

He’d been so indignant when Croatoan offered him a copy of Audrey. How could he say yes to that? No imitation could replace her, no matter how skillfully crafted out of aether and magical thinking. They were in this together, the three of them the last good thing. It was obvious, a single, real thing Nathan could hang on to like a good luck charm. Then it was gone. 

He wasn’t proud of himself for being so weak, so selfish. But he’d given everything for this failed experiment from another world. That’s all Haven was – a prison for some otherworldly being, a creature too powerful to be contained even by the magic of her own twisted dimension because she was the undisputed master of it. First there had been Mara, and he’d tried to reconcile that she and Audrey were cut from the same cloth, light and dark sides of an extremely ancient coin. It didn’t make sense to him, and that might have been the hardest part to wrap his brain around. Audrey, Sarah, Lucy, even Lexi had been the same person to him, the same heart beating and mind working inside the slightly altered exterior that returned each time. He wasn’t surprised to feel the same things for Sarah that he felt for Audrey, to feel that sting when he looked at Lucy.

Back then Duke hadn’t been able to do the same. Intellectually he knew they were the same person, the same yet not quite. Almost like identical twins with shared DNA and faces but some spark inside that was completely unique. Nathan had always loved the eternal Audrey, the one who cycled back to Haven every 27 years, but Duke loved Audrey Parker in her singularity and felt nothing for the previous incarnations marching backward In time. And yet Duke was the one who could find something in Mara, when Nathan could only feel disgust and pain at the sight of her. 

When Mara winked out of existence for good, Nathan breathed a sigh of relief and thought _finally, it doesn’t matter who she was. It doesn’t matter who was right. There’s just one Audrey_. But the boundaries between their worlds were too thin, too exposed, and then Haven was cut off from everything and everyone outside and the threat of Mara felt like a silly game compared to dealing with her father. 

Nathan naively believed that together the three of them were strong. That they could overcome anything. And then he was destroying one of the two people who made him want to keep living through this misery. He promised Duke he’d be grateful for his sacrifice, that he’d spend every day living to honor it. Those words meant something very different when he said them than when they circled the fog of loss and anger in his head. Because there was nothing he could do here to honor Duke’s life. There was nothing here for him or Audrey but to ache, shatter and die. 

He knew Duke better than anyone else in the world. He knew that was not what he would consider honoring his life and his loss. 

So he found Croatoan and he struck a new deal. He wasn’t proud of it. But they’d all been so strong for so long, so selfless, and so stupid to believe that it meant anything at all. Maybe he was a coward. If he was, it seemed like maybe he was just becoming what everyone else, every sane person anyway, had always been. Nathan needed quiet, peace. He needed to close his eyes on the ruin of Haven and open them to something kinder, something gentler. 

And so he did.

+++

There’s a little spot on the beach where they spend most Sundays, just about half a mile down from the crowded public shoreline where kids splash in the waves and tourists read cheap paperbacks and slather on sunscreen. The white sand that gets trucked in twice a year for the main beach fades away to something coarser, more grey, and the waves break hard over rocks that make swimming almost unsafe. But Duke and Nathan grew up in the ocean. There’s salt water and the glint of crushed shells in their veins. The three of them pack up some blankets and some food, stuff a bag with books and haul together some fishing tackle that might get used. No one ever comes to their little section of the sea, and Nathan wonders if that’s all part of Croatoan’s design as well. The two of them alive and well and happy, their own little path of sand and sky and water. It’s the snow globe trouble all over again, but this time Nathan won’t escape.

“Tell me something about before,” Audrey says, her voice lazy and sleepy. She’s decimated an enormous sandwich and made a good dent in the lemon bars Nathan brings her from the bakery right down the street from the house. “Tell me something about you from before.”

It’s not an infrequent request, and he knows she means _tell me about the parts of you both that I missed, tell me about you when I wasn’t real_. She doesn’t mean _tell me about how you replaced us, traded us in for new models without the miles and the dents_. 

Duke catches his eye, smiling because he can remember them as awkward, difficult adolescents. He only remembers the safe parts of Haven – they both know the troubles were real, that they tried to fix them. But then one day in their memories the three of them called it quits and lit out for this life. In a way, they remember themselves just as selfish as Nathan really has been. 

“Nathan was in the A/V club. He’d come into your classroom and set up a projector so you could watch some movie about World War II or wheat production in the midwest. He was,” Duke says, as confidential as if he’s telling secrets she’s never heard before, “ a huge nerd. I think he spent more time with electronics than he did with people, because they couldn’t make him talk about himself.”

“I was,” Nathan admits. “I was a weird kid.”

Audrey huffs, shaking her head. “You’re not weird.”

“All teenagers are weird,” Duke says with a shrug. He falls back onto Nathan, twisting until his head rests in his lap. “But he was the smartest person I knew, and I hated how upright he was. You know what I mean.” Audrey nods for him to go on, as if it’s obvious. “We were friends, then we weren’t, then we were, then we weren’t. Then there was you.” 

Nathan’s fingers card through Duke’s hair, not really paying attention to anything he’s saying in favor of marveling over the insane idea that every strand, every follicle is as real as he is. From his genetic code to the sun-bleached ends of his hair it’s the real Duke, somehow given back. No longer just a body cooling on a desk in the police station. Sometimes Nathan is afraid both of them will drift away or evaporate if he stops vehemently admiring the realness of them, the way they fill the exact same slots in his heart as their counterparts. One dead, one probably lost to a world of magic as science and strange creatures of the void. 

A shiver runs through him despite the heat of the sun, but if Duke notices he doesn’t mention it. 

“Duke was…” He’s told her so many stories, and even the most pedestrian please her. _We played little league together. Duke wrecked his car and I helped him hide it from his mom. I was salutatorian, but he helped me through three years of French. One time we spent the whole weekend on Little Tall Island and slept under the stars and I thought maybe that was something more than just being friends. When my mom died he saw me crying and didn’t tell anyone – he knew what that was like, too_. She’s always been hungry for any shred of what built them into the people she loves and sometimes it feels like he’s running out of scraps to feed her. 

“He was my friend, even when we didn’t see each other for years. Even when we hated each other. We were always friends. I think he understood me more than anybody else, even when I didn’t understand myself. Even when I wasn’t someone I was proud of.”

She smiles at that, always most pleased by the beautiful things, the warm things that justified the present. Treats and novel discarded, she settles in next to Duke, burying Nathan in affection and warm skin. “I wish I knew you then. I wish I knew everything about you both.”

Duke starts telling her about some post-high school adventure, exaggerating the good parts and inventing a fair few exploits and Nathan smiles and nods, letting him make them out to be quite a bit more heroic than they deserve. In the end, he would much rather be the man they imagine than the one he’s decided to become.

+++

He goes back to Haven, just once, just to see the consequences of his choices. He knows it’s fruitless torture – he’s not going to walk out on a second set of Duke and Audrey, abandoning them to salve his conscience for abandoning their predecessors. Half of him expects to find the impenetrable fog still in place, but there’s nothing to stop him from driving down Route 3 and across the city line. The familiar buildings and landmarks are still standing, the streets still lead exactly where they always have. It looks like an average small town to anyone passing through, boats docked in the harbor and the flag whipping in the wind over the town hall.  
Nathan parks the truck in front of the police station and takes it in for a moment, his cop senses tingling with the feeling of _something wrong_ , but there’s nothing to confirm that. The skies are clear, the streets are quiet. It takes at least ten minutes before he realizes just how quiet it really is. Not a single car passes in the stretch of time he spends pondering, not a single person comes in or out of the station or walks down the sidewalk. There’s no traffic noise from Main Street, no sirens, no muffled alerts from the Coast Guard. There’s only soft wind rustling through the trees and the deepening silence that suggests no one has set foot here in a very, very long time.

Whatever life he had here is gone, erased by his own hand and replaced with this strange shell of a town, almost like a living doll house that’s been emptied of dolls and long forgotten. He drives to what used to be the Gull and lets himself inside, climbing the stairs to Audrey’s old apartment as if there’s any chance he’ll be detected. 

Everything is askew as if the place has been ransacked, a thick layer of dust coating her piano and a few pieces of mail left lying on the kitchen counter. There are still signs of their life everywhere here, the book Duke was reading still open on the dresser in the bedroom and a case file haphazardly spilled on the floor in the living room. Two of his shirts hang in the closet, sandwiched between a dress he never saw Audrey wear and an ugly, worn grandpa sweater. 

They fell in love in this apartment, nurtured with late rainy nights on the deck huddled beneath a blanket that was too small for three, Duke making dinner while he and Audrey contributed nothing more than admiration, mornings when no one had to go anywhere and they had long, sun-lit afternoons to waste in bed in a tangle. 

Of course those weren’t the things he set out to escape. 

He’s not sure how long he waits, half-heartedly hoping Audrey will appear from somewhere. He can see it clearly, how her face would flood with relief and happiness, how she’d never believe for a minute that he would leave her behind, not for anything. Years of watching Audrey manage the troubles left him with few illusions about her – she could be manipulative, short-sighted, desperate. But she never lost faith in him, in the three of them. Duke broke free and came back for them. Came back because Nathan asked him to, and came back to die for them. 

Eventually the sun sinks down into the bay and a chill starts to blow off the water. Nathan can stay here in the ruins of Haven as long as he likes, but at this point he’s little more than an archaeologist. He can see how they lived, touch the things that made up their existence, but never step back into it. The heat between them, the frantic need and loyalty and stupid determination to stand against the world together are gone as if they never mattered at all. 

The drive home is long, just him and the radio playing old songs he half knows the words to. He makes a few stops on the way, picks up a few new records for Audrey and a box of the baklava Duke complains about eating too much of as he sneaks another piece. They may be puzzles with missing pieces, but Nathan can fill them in bit by bit, patch the cracks with new favorites, new memories. He owes them that much at least.

If either of them find it odd that he’s been gone for hours, they don’t mention it. Audrey greets him with a kiss that feels like he was missing for at least a million years as Duke descends the stairs covered in sawdust and singing “I’m On Fire” under his breath. They follow him back up to admire the new master bedroom, Audrey cooing over the expanded closet space as if he’s slain a dragon for her. 

“It’s like those old rooms never existed,” she exclaims as they pick up stray boards and sweep up sawdust around her. “Doesn’t it feel like it’s always been this way?”

Duke complains that his back suggests otherwise, but Nathan has to admit that yes, it does really feel that way.

+++

Winter comes and it’s too cold to sit outside on the steps, but Nathan does so anyway. There’s so much ambient city light that it’s impossible to see the stars, but he imagines them there against a sky that threatens snow any minute. Twinkling white lights line the windows and Frank Sinatra croons wishes for a merry little Christmas inside, and any minute now he’s going to go back in and have exactly that. Any minute now.

The door creaks open and a minute later Audrey sits down next to him, snuggling in close until he wraps an arm around her shoulders. She’s always cold lately, it seems. Both of them are, complaining that the wind blows in around the old windows and that the floors feel like ice. Nathan builds them fires and brings them blankets, surrounds them with himself and tires to pour every once of his warmth into them as he convinces himself one more time that it doesn’t mean anything, that they’re just fine. 

“Everything ok?” she asks, still trying to burrow in closer. “You’ve been gone a while.”

He drops a kiss on her forehead, then another on her lips when she tilts her face up to receive it. “Yeah, everything is good. It’s just beautiful out here.” It’s not a lie, either – the houses on their street are dressed up in Christmas finery with white snow caps on every roof, and colorful snowflakes, candles and bells light up every telephone pole. “Everything ok inside?”

“It is,” she reassures him. “Duke’s just about got the lights on the tree. He’s a lot less crabby now.”

“I bet.” 

“Then come inside and drink gin and tonics with us and help decorate the tree and enjoy Christmas.” The blinking Christmas lights illuminate her face in flashes and if there’s any sign that something’s gone wrong, that they’re somehow less real than they were just months ago, Nathan can’t find it. She pulls herself up and holds out a hand to him, and while it’s cold as ice it’s still solid and undeniably Audrey. “Come on.”

“Audrey, wait.” He pauses in the doorway, not sure why he’s saying the words but not quite able to stop them either. “I have to tell you something. Something I haven’t been honest with you about.”

She looks unperturbed, but Nathan knows her face well enough to see the gears turning beneath. “Ok.”

His first instinct is to stare at his feet and try to swallow his tongue, but instead he holds her gaze and ignores the discomfort it causes. “I’m not who you think I am. I was so afraid, and I just caved in under it, turned into something I don’t think you’d recognize. Someone I don’t want to recognize.”

She’s silent for a minute, studying his face and still gripping his hand. Audrey nods her head slowly, like she’s listening underwater and trying to make out what each word means, piecing it all together bit by blurry bit. Finally she nods one last time. “I see you, ok? I know you, and when I look at you, I really see you. And so does Duke.”

“If you did –“

The expression she turns on him is fierce, the sort of look he’s seen her use on suspects that just won’t budge, the kind of glare that makes you regret everything you’d said and done and then some. 

“I do.” Her words are measured, careful. “I promise you Nathan, I do.”

He’s about to argue with her, spill his guts into her lap and let her do what she wants with the confession, hate him if that’s what she thinks he deserves and take away everything for a second time because he knows he’s earned it. The words are there on the tip of his tongue, but he opens his mouth and closes it again and lets the full weight of her eyes settle on him. 

“You knew.”

“I don’t…” she trails off, her brow wrinkling as if she’s struggling to explain something very complicated to a very small child. Which, he realizes, she basically is. “I know you. I know you’ve been eaten up over something for months, and I know you well enough to know that I should know what it is. And I don’t.”

“Parker.”

“I know something happened to us. And I think you made a choice, and you hate yourself for it. You think we wouldn’t have made the same one and I don’t know, maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe we’d have been stronger or better or smarter, whatever you think you weren’t. But you did, and now we’re here. Is that close?”

He nods, swallowing hard. “That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“And you can’t change it, can you? Because I’d wager that you’ve already looked for a way to.” She reaches up to brush his hair back from his eyes and settles her hand at the top of his spine. “We always wanted to choose our fates, Nathan. You chose this one and it’s not so bad, is it? Are you so unhappy?”

“You know I’m not,” he says, barely audible even in the stillness of the night. 

“Then let it go. Stay with us. Come inside with me. Please.” There’s no anger or resentment on her face, just the same warmth she always looks at him with, unshakeable. “We need you.”

_You’ll never know the difference, Croatoan told him. They’ll be exactly as they were._

_Exactly?_

_Well, there are always seams, Nathan, no matter how tightly and carefully you stitch them, there are going to be seams. You can look for them, or you can appreciate what they hold together._

Something flares up inside him for just a moment. Anger, he thinks. Anger that Audrey always fought to fill in the gaps in her history and see the hazy bits clearly and now she could accept such a large, glaring blank spot. 

Duke always loved Audrey Parker, Officer Agent Parker with the mysterious past and the magic touch with the troubles. Not Sarah, not Lucy, not Lexi. Nathan could learn to love Audrey Parker who loved old records and the tacky foil star he folded for the top of the tree. He could learn to love Duke Crocker with plaster in his hair and absolutely no guns hidden under their kitchen table and chairs. There wasn’t even anything to learn, not really. They were already his so fully that it would be impossible to unwrap any part of him from the whole of them together. 

“Is anyone going to come inside and tell me what a great job I did on the lights?” Duke appears in the doorway with three glasses in his hands and a look of slight annoyance. “Or are we spending Christmas on the porch?”

Nathan accepts his drink and finishes it in three swallows before telling him that the lights are perfect and no one could have done better. They decorate the tree with ornaments from the big box store on the other side of town and he and Duke laugh as Audrey buries the tree’s branches in tinsel.  
Later Duke pulls them down in front of the dying fire and Nathan touches them like they’re both brand new, committing them to memory with his hands. Audrey drifts off as the last sparks fade away and he and Duke talk quietly about Nathan’s day and their plan to take her ice skating tomorrow, even at great peril to their dignity. It’s not until Duke cups the back of his neck and pulls him in to kiss him that Nathan realizes his hands are warm, hot even, the cold finally driven out. Audrey feels like a small furnace between them. 

Nathan’s not proud of what he’s done and who he became, and he’s sure he never will be. But Audrey was right. They need him, much more than he needs to punish himself every day for their existence. It’s arrogant to think that he’s any more real than they are, not when every stick of this life is built on his lies and weakness. If he can love them enough to keep them real, there’s no reason they can’t do the same for him. 

He sleeps through the night for the first time in months and when he wakes up surrounded by the warmth of their bodies and the sun streaming through the windows there’s only a moment before he closes his eyes again and settles into it.

**Author's Note:**

> I know this probably doesn't seem very charitable to Nathan -- after all, he shut down any offer of a copy of Audrey pretty quickly. But, I'm an OT3 shipper and I felt like the show sort of let any possibility of bringing Duke back just kind of fall by the way. So I hope this reads more as "Nathan is human and fallible and afraid of losing everyone he loves" than "Nathan is kind of a bastard."


End file.
